heir part, were strongly attracted to
him. His fine stature and presence in the first place appealed
powerfully, as it always does to a fine race of warlike savages, in the
next, his thoroughbred look, and well-bred ways told too; and the
latter, no people are more capable of appreciating than these. As for
the part he had taken against them in the late war, no shadow of a
grudge or resentment did they bear against him for it; on the contrary,
they looked upon him with enhanced respect on the strength of it; even
as he himself had predicted to Lalante would be the case. A man must
fight at the "word" of his king, was their way of looking at it. They
and the whites had met in fair fight; sometimes one side had got the
best of it, and sometimes the other. There was no room for rancour on
account of anything so plain and obvious. So Wyvern greatly enjoyed
those hours spent in the company of dusky warriors, with a cool bowl of
freshly-brewed _tywala_ before him, the clinging cockroaches shimmering
in the thatch of the hut overhead, while they vividly recapitulated the
stirring times, not so long past, or mapped out with small stones on the
floor--and with wonderful accuracy--the scene of more than one pitched
battle from the point of view of their own position and tactics. And it
might be that the time was coming when this good understanding should
stand him in some stead in the hour of his sore peril and need.

And the incidents of the _trek_, and this in itself, was no mere picnic.
There were times when the conditions of the road--though road in
anything like the ordinary sense of the word there was none--were
frequently such as to render five miles a day the utmost limits of their
advance; when they would spend half a day stuck in a river-bed, with the
flood steadily rising, the result of that slaty, blue-black curtain of
cloud forming the background further up in the hills; when the storm
beat down upon them in its terrific crash, and the whole atmosphere
seemed tinged with incandescent electricity; and only by a well-nigh
superhuman effort of desperation could they at length induce the span to
move at the critical moment, failure in which would mean loss of half
their outfit and of more than one life. Or when, after a tremendous
rain-burst, the wheels would sink in the boggy soil, rendering it
necessary to unload the contents of both waggons and dig a way out; and
even then it might be necessary to chop a number